


Gekko-B-Gone: Rates Reasonable

by bmouse



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, Non Graphic Descriptions of Violence, What-If, despite the title not actually a crackfic, post-MGS2, pre-MGS4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-31
Updated: 2014-05-31
Packaged: 2018-01-27 17:03:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1718054
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bmouse/pseuds/bmouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After an overseeing mission goes south Meryl's team gets some help from a dead man.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gekko-B-Gone: Rates Reasonable

For all her faith in the System, Meryl couldn't deny that once in a while these clusterfucks happened. Some newbie warlord decided to cheap out on his PMC's and wasn't smart enough to think through how one of the lowest ranked companies managed to afford two IRVING units. 

Turns out the IRVINGs were illegally salvaged from a skirmish three years ago.  
"..and then of course normally the Army takes them in for a maintenance cycle: flush the black boxes, back up their memories, reinstall the latest patches but you really ought to see it Commander, it's like... it's like they got a state school undergrads to duct tape the AI code together!"

"Not now, Akiba." 

Christ, he didn’t have to sound so gleeful about it.

Yes boo-hoo the poor thing's missile launchers were jammed and the targeting system was 30 percent from optimal. It could still puree a team in five seconds. Early-model IRVING's weren't even ID tagged. Individual PMC registration was considered enough so the System didn't start pathing them until they'd been officially 'engaged' in combat action. Like these weren’t.

Of course when the stupid bastard's side started losing, the warlord's idea of 'tactics' was to send them out with hard wired orders to waste anything in sensor range. And since that maneuver wasn't in the region rulebook nobody at his HQ had bothered to notify the battle overseers and the other side was too busy hauling ass.

So now her team - the battle overseers - are holed up in an office building whose best days probably correlated with the musical rise of "Queen." Cut corners and rotting stucco everywhere. The front lobby's still smoking half-heartedly from the morning's mortar, rebar pinging from the strain. No exit that way even if they wanted to. All in all her back's crawling and while the nanos won’t let her heart-rate pass 95 they can’t stop her brain playing back specs. Against even the IRVING's basic cannon they all might as well be hiding under cardboard.

They're stuck and blind. The sun is going down. Outside visibility is shit - all fog and gray. It's been threatening to storm all week and today looks like a likely breaking point. A cold rain curtain would make their body heat flare like little suns. Just as she’s done thinking it the first sheet comes down, teasing clear notes out of the broken skylights and totally ruining her day. Luckily for now, half the building's smoking with hot pockets but that won’t fool them forever. Just how long can the lobby support beams last before they crack? The gatling or the masonry isn’t a choice she can make for her team. She won’t.

"..ooooOOOooooooouuu "

Faint and far away the sound still makes the broken windows rattle. The walking tanks are getting closer, and them without even a lousy set of mines. Outside, the world has become faded and white in the escalating rain, ghostly buildings under a bruised sky. 

Was it too much to hope one of the damn things would get struck by lightning?

"Ed?" she whisper-yells. 

Ed and Jonathan are in the tricky spot by the back window, better for catching waves but too far away from the reinforced ribs of the building for her taste 

"How's that radio?"

"Not so hot, Commander. "

143.56 - static. 143.65 - more of the same. 144.3 has them all perked up for a second with a brisk flurry of morse but soon even she could tell it was just a message loop; the location of a cache or a meeting spot, weeks out of date. Useless. At least the scrolling numbers might keep Akiba's mind off his bladder. Her own too, for that matter.

151.2 is silent, dead silent in a way decoy frequencies aren't. The silence fills the room until it's broken by the soft echo of the thunderclap they hear over their own heads a split second later. Ed springs into action, his mellow speaking voice cranked to half authority and maximum charm.

"This is UN peacekeeper Rat Patrol Team 01..."

Static, like a breath and then: "Get off my frequency." 

"Is this a Drebin?"

"No. Don't make me repeat myself." 

Dammit who is this asshole?! Would it kill for people to be helpful? This is why she's not on radio - she'd be yelling by now. Ed just switches tacks

"Look man, we don't even care why you're out there, OK. There's a situation with... "

"The Gekkos? You've got two now. Northeast." The voice sounds bored. Gekko? Mercenary slang. Ed picks up on it.

"Hey, can you patch me to your squad leader? I need to talk to-"

"Not applicable. Only 4 life signs left in the area, yours?"

So, some kind of non-SOP-compliant advanced scanning equipment - bad and good news. Good in that they could probably use this guy and bad because custom equipment way over the region warprice usually spelled ‘assassin.’ Shit shit shit, she’s gotta think.

“…” there’s a soft breath by her ear.

“What’s that Akiba? Speak up!” she hisses.

“…power.”

“That’s a stupid idea! We’re official reps here, we can’t owe people favors!”

“N-no, Commander.” He stammers ”I was thinking more literally, we’ve still got all those powercells. Anybody’s who’s out there for long stretches without a gang or sponsorship in an underdeveloped area like this needs fuel, right?” 

It’s an Akiba plan for sure, tentatively pitched and traditionally bookended with him awkwardly rubbing his neck, puppy-brown eyes begging for approval behind his smart goggles. Sometimes though, Akiba-plans worked.

She crawls over and grabs the mic.

“This is the Rat Patrol Unit Commander. How about supplies? I can spare four XV-6 powercells. Can you draw the IRVING away from our position?”

“Four? Give me the eight you have and you can walk out.”

“Fine.” Now’s not the time to be greedy.

“For our sake, man. I hope you’ve got a railgun or something.” Ed chimes in on the secondary mic. His headphones spit out some static. Cut connection. He frowns down at the radio then goes back to the dial, pragmatic as ever. 

“Jeez, that guy’s been out there for too long.”

“How can you tell?” she asks, sitting back against the wall. Now it’s all hurry up and wait. Ugly as it is, even if Mr. 151.2 is grossly overselling himself ( like these lone-wolf assholes do ) they can make a move in the time it takes for the IRVINGs to deal with him.

Ed’s still fiddling but the box seems to be fresh out of miracles and he stows it back into its carrycase. 

“Well, usually when you get to the point where you’re answering random calls to your frequency you’re just desperate to talk to anybody. Stone-faced seven year vets’ll be telling you stories about the dog they used to have when they were a kid, about their exes, the plots of soaps they used to bootleg on R&R real inane shit. Then when you get over that hump, people just stop talking at all. Like they forgot how.” 

They don’t wait long.

Four blocks away there is a resounding crash. It’s not thunder. In fact it sounds suspiciously like three tons of upright metal falling through a building. 

“Oooooo oooOOOoo-” 

The cry cuts off. Meryl wonders, not for the first time, what kind of sick fuck programmed quasi-emoting vocalizations into a walking tank. She’s heard them coo happily as their prehensile wires pretzeled a man’s spine. 

The downed one’s teammate crashes up their street, sidestepping jagged car wrecks with unholy grace. As it pirouettes around a barricade, the forward guns are pointed right at their position. 

Everyone stops breathing. Any second now the dumb thing will realize that the other one is down and switch back from ‘support teammate’ to ‘destroy heat sources.’ With one foot up, it stops and God, she hopes the warlord’s programmers were as crap as Akiba said.

“OoooooerhhhooooooooOOOnn” It rumbles. 

It sounds pissed. Something silvery flickers in the burned out residentials across from the hotel. Just as her hand slowly comes up to give the guys the handsign for ‘bug out’ a crazy bastard in a ragged black coat jumps through a broken window and lands on top of the still-compiling IRVING. Her binoculars come down, auto-zooming in to track the action and as the carefully-measured adrenalin hits her system her mind picks up details: white hair, some kind of body armor. Maybe a partial exo-suit. She can see that he is not carrying a sticky mine or even a block of C4, which is the usual weapon-du-jour for this kind of stunt. 

He is carrying a katana. What the ever-loving fuck. 

Gun turrets swivel, one with a shower of sparks. The IRVING’s finally un-stuck itself but that’s not saving it - the merc cuts the rightmost turret in half and by the time the left one’s facing where he used to be he’s gracefully flipped up and over the edge of the main platform, somehow clinging to fuck-all on the bottom of the body. Behind her, Akiba sucks in a noisy breath. His eyes are wide behind the goggles - all wonder.

The IRVING drops into a full split. 

Three tons of metal hit the street, concrete shattering around it like an ugly unfurling flower. There isn’t even a scream.

“Fuck!” she swears. Fucking show-off amateur. Guess they’ll be keeping those batteries. 

Down below something’s moving in the dust cloud. A figure stands up, its shock of white hair catching the cold grey light as it slinks across the battlefield. The Gekko whirrs threateningly, its camera moving, tracking. An enormous metal leg twists inhumanly backwards in its socket, smashes down, misses, moves across - sweeping cement dividers and burned-out barrels with it like they were made of air. But the merc vaults over it. For just a split second he’s standing atop the left hip joint.

His sword flashes in a cross-cut. 

The head-assembly tilts, slides, and falls backwards leaving the legs standing alone. Another slash separates the left from the right and they fall apart, slowly, gracefully - like stately old trees, embedding themselves in the ruined buildings on either side of the street. Following the fall, the merc rolls to his feet flicking the oil from his sword and sheathing it in a snake-quick movement. 

Lighting flashes. Even the nanomachines can’t stop her eyes from blinking. When the thunder arrives the street is empty.

\- - -

Like people walking through a dream Jon and Ed load the powercells into a black duffel bag. If anyone asks they were dumped as extra weight in a combat action. Thankfully SOP isn’t anal enough to track batteries. Yet. Absolutely none of this is going in a report.

There is an eerily polite knock on the door. With a meaningful look to the others to stand ready she drags the duffel to the center of the room and steps back. Akiba makes himself at home at her nine, in the shadow of her shoulder.

As the door swings open the first thing she notices are the merc’s feet. Something’s not right with them, something inhuman in their proportions: too thin, too flat, obviously metal but too small to hold a real foot inside. Prosthetics. Is that why he agreed to the battery barter?

An old black coat covers everything from his calves to his neck. Only the top of the exosuit is visible - some fancy new model with strips of artificial muscle cording their way up the neck ending in a metal chinguard. A visor on top of that, hiding his face completely. Oh that is some suspicious shit. Her hair is lifting off her neck just looking at this bastard. The room feels charged, electric, like they’re all in the middle of a power station. Though it could just be the storm.

As he steps forward the floorboards twist and creak. Smoothly, without a word, he leans down and picks up the bag. Meryl exhales very slowly, just waiting for the sound of things going south. When it comes, it comes from over her shoulder.

“Um hi there, thanks a lot for helping us out and..”

“Shut up Akiba” she hisses.

He stops. Six red guidelights flash to life behind the visor, tracking across the tech’s face and without orders from her brain her hand starts creeping toward the frag grenade on her belt. This thing better not lay a finger on her men. 

With a soft click the opaque visor swings upward, one baleful eye-cover smoothly retracts revealing a face - white and clammy with the rain, like drowning victim’s - but a normal, human face. Or most of one. Her eyes follow the straight nose down to the jaw. To were a jaw should be.

“Christ.” Akiba whispers.

A bloodless upper lip twists up at the corner. The steel skull-teeth below it completely fail to follow the motion, making an aborted smile. The goddamn thing is laughing at them.

“Your building’s on fire. Better move soon.”

It says flatly through a throat-mic. He, still probably ‘he’ - there’s the remnant of a young man’s voice in the synthesizer - seems indifferent to everything now that the fight with the Gekko is over. Other little details fall in: the mass difference, the sudden ionized quality of the air. Up close the damp white hair looks brittle and dead. 

As she grabs and pulls Akiba back by the vest his gaze briefly switches to her.  
It’s easier to stare back at the jaw fixture than at the cyborg’s washed-out blue eye, simultaneously childlike and old.

“There’s another exit if you need it. The stairs next to the freight elevator are in pretty good shape.” She points northwest. “That way.” Later she still has no idea why she said it. 

She doesn’t get an answer. With maybe the faintest tilt of the head the eye-cover slides forward, the visor comes down. He hefts the duffle over an unnaturally broad shoulder and keeps walking through the room, past Ed and Jon until he gets to the other door. 

It used to open to an adjoining suite in a section that was sheared away in some earlier shelling, probably years before they got here. Now it opens to a four story drop. For a second the wind flutters the hem of his coat and he’s gone.

\- - -

After a few minutes the rain lets up. The sun has set but the field of view is clear. The guys are ready to go. Akiba’s finished setting up a bug in case the warlord’s remaining men crawl back into town tomorrow. His movements are a little more subdued than usual.

Meryl leans slightly out of the broken window, her binoculars are still tracking the faraway motion below. The cyborg doesn’t turn around. His metal feet click off the gleaming wet concrete, past the final streetlight without stopping - as if the barrier between the last bit of light and the darkness didn’t mean a thing.

**Author's Note:**

> Not really sure what prompted this. I think I just woke up with the idea and thought 'wouldn't this be cool?' I guess it bothered me that in MGS4 Meryl didn't even do a double-take when she saw that one of Snake's allies was a seven foot tall clinically depressed cyberninja.


End file.
